Peter Salter - Walmer Yard

CONTENTS 4 Foreword – Peter Salter 7 Conversations – Crispin Kelly 29 Connections – Peter Salter 61 Recollections – Peter Beardsell 69 Closeness – Mark Dorrian 95 Materials – Fenella Collingridge 103 Craftsmen – Peter Salter 143 Introverse – Matthew Ritchie 160 Biographies + Acknowledgements

Foreword I would like to take this opportunity to thank the contributors to this book on Walmer Yard: Crispin Kelly, Fenella Collingridge, Peter Beardsell, Mark Dorrian, Matthew Ritchie, and Hélène Binet for her photographs.

It is the contributors who have grounded the work seen in these pages. Like Seamus Heaney’s childhood hedge, their essays ‘figure’ the space in which the tree might grow. In the same vein, Walmer Yard is an architectural insertion into the fabric of west London, figured by the buildings, backlots and party walls of Notting Hill Gate – an insertion layered and cast against the figure of Victorian Shepherds Bush.

What needs to be understood are the people who planted the ‘tree’ and nurtured the building. Because of the unusual procurement process, adversarial site meetings were kept to a minimum and in the latter stages of the building processes, the meetings were more like the proceedings of a community club, its members having met for twelve years.

In 2005, John Comparelli set up a site office to begin the working drawings. Each evening, while Fenella Colingridge, Nick Coombe and myself went home, John slept on site in the shell of the derelict building.

During the day we worked, with John having proprietorial sanction of the desk arrangements and more importantly, of building regulations. Nick worked on the drawings for the bathrooms and kitchen insertions, his delicacy of touch and precision greatly valued. The domestic scale of Walmer Yard necessitated this level of precision, and it became a mantra for all other architectural resolutions made there.

In 2007, Shaw Building Group and Mole Architects were appointed to begin the process of building. The expertise of Daren Bye and the site manager David Tofts – as joinery specialists and plumbers – were particularly suited to the intricacies of this site, with the need to manipulate concrete forms and stacks of reinforcement, but also the position of the welfare room and the foreign languages that needed translation around the site. With the largest pieces of equipment, it was a never-ending dance. As joinery specialists, they were able to ensure that much of the formwork was built off site in the joinery workshop, so there was none of the sawing and approximation of most concrete works. The shuttering, made by Noel O’Connor, was as precise as the later second-fix joinery; the measurements and tooling of machines were set against the largest possible shutter sizes in order to negate the need for tolerances between pours. Hugo Keene’s drawings of the board-marked shuttering layout, with their dimensional precision and colour legends, were not lost on Noel. Building sequences and tolerances had no place as everything gradually became bespoke.

Much of the black steelwork was assembled on site. The building site became a fabrication shop, where the welding gang in machine-shop blue overalls and with oily hands manipulated steel pieces on chain lifting rigs, the smell of steel cutting lubricant offsetting the smell of welding behind green plastic screens.

Over the course of time, many skilled and dedicated men worked at Walmer Yard, whether the man who directed the pumped concrete hose and vibrator, whose daughter was studying architecture, or the Albanian craftsman who laid the floor screeds, having previously laid terrazzo floors in Venice. All of them contributed to the beauty of Walmer Yard and I thank them profusely.

Peter Salter, February 2019

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SECOND FLOOR 1 ďŹ replace 2 light snorkel 3 yard 4 shutters 5 balcony 6 living room 7 dining room 8 bathroom 9 alcove 10 kitchen 11 rooight over 12 loggia

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FIRST FLOOR 1 roof house 4 2 light snorkel 3 void 4 shutters 5 balcony 6 dressing room 7 bedroom 8 bathroom 9 wardrobes 10 walldoor

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An early plan of embedded elements folding around to ďŹ nd more space. From the roof terraces it is possible to see the layering and embedding of similar elements, and sometimes one can trace the outline of the plan.

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The layering of shutters provides privacy, allowing shadow and soft light to pervade the volume of the room behind. The un-shuttered strips of windows register the ceiling levels of those rooms, while the ‘tiller arms’ co-ordinate the movement of the shutters below, like the regulated skin movement of some ancient reptile.

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The standing-seam copper roof of House 4 (left) contrasts with the roof of the yurts (right), where overlapping tiles are ďŹ xed directly to the crosslaminated timber skin. Each method eliminates condensation in a different way. The yurt construction uses a breathable membrane on the inside of the construction. Standing seam construction could not be used on the yurts (right) because the gentle three-dimensional facets would have been lost by the airgaps of the cold construction, whereas the tile can be bent to follow the facets and the curvature of the panels. Because the tile cannot be used on shallow roof inclines, the eaves line of the yurt has a copper skirt that pushes back the standing seam of the roof above.

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Connections Peter Salter Walmer Yard used to be occupied by a Victorian warehouse built on the brickfields between the 1840s Norland estate and the Regency terraces of Ladbroke Grove. These two speculatively built estates made an urban grain of repetitive housing elements, which gave identity and form to a neighbourhood that I knew well as a child.

Apart from some bomb damage, the Norland estate remained more or less intact up to the late 1960s when, as part of the redevelopment plan for Shepherd’s Bush, its west side was demolished and replaced with a housing estate, including three towers. The introduction of high-rise changed the footprint and density of planning. The completeness of the old block forms, such as Royal Crescent, with their accompanying mews buildings, now had to coexist with a Modernist estate: social housing units built to Parker Morris standards and assembled with no front or back, no clues to articulate a street frontage.

Gone, too, was the street market on Norland Road, along with its sandstone-faced buildings and the bullnose pubs that once punctuated the street scene and lent their names to the locale. The pub facades, painted in pawnbroker’s maroon and gold, disguised a meandering chain of interlinked rooms that eventually joined the two adjacent streets – a place to hide when mother sent a child to extricate father from the saloon on payday.

The sense of ‘interior’ completeness of the nineteenth-century layout of mews, avenues and gardens was lost to the open planning and truncated streets of the 1960s. In the postwar years, an understanding of what constituted the back of the estate, formed through the functions of the mews (from clothes-drying to love affairs), had offered a classless territory in a residually class-ridden society. Today, gentrification has made an architecture of ‘fronts’ from these modest lock-ups and stables.

Walmer Yard is near the location of the early television sitcom Steptoe and Son, a tale of rag-and-bone men and posh houses. It is also around the corner from the ultra-chic restaurant and bar, Julie’s, haunt of the glitterati since the 1960s, and from the studio in which David Hemmings photographed Verushka and Vanessa Redgrave in Antonioni’s Blow-Up – the ultimate depiction of Swinging London. These are the contradictions of our site: kaftans and Cowshed beauty products in the white stucco frontage of Portland Road, greasy-spoon cafés on Latimer Road. The context is made up of fragments of housing from the Norland estate period onwards, including some well-mannered postwar social housing.

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Walmer Yard is an attempt to add to the many diverse communities that now inhabit the area, and to reclaim the sense of an interior that once existed here.

On opening up the site, we were able to see the spatial connections between the street frontage on Walmer Road and the garden space leading to Portland Road. The form of the site – deep, with a narrow frontage – made it impossible to replicate the estate forms of repetitive units; instead we explored an attenuated set of spaces, more akin to the lost pubs of Norland Road.

As social values changed in postwar Britain, the neat logic of the form of the mews as a service building was lost in a grab for land. Whereas in the past, property boundaries were shaped by the development of large estates, now an ad hoc pattern of growth prevails. The neighbourhood of Notting Hill Gate has become one of the most densely populated parts of London, as the majority of the terraces of Ladbroke Grove and Holland Park have been converted into multi-occupancy dwellings. Divided in this way, the existing houses are no longer tenable as single-family homes.

I planned Walmer Yard as a series of dwellings of a more appropriate size set around a common external space, a courtyard that draws on the intimacy of the mews. Given the complexity and cost of development, the number of dwellings had to be maximised. In such circumstances, repetitive house forms could not exploit the complexity of the space; individual designs were needed, together with an almost medieval plan of piecemeal spatial additions.

The design evolved as a spatial negotiation. Each house has a particular geometry in its form and orientation, in a ‘push-me-pull-you’ arrangement that maximises the floor area across the development and offers larger room sizes, a greater sense of space and direct sunlight. The houses are planned around the courtyard, which is oriented to receive sun from the south. The courtyard acts as an oculus for the passage of light between certain hours of the day. Another major cleavage was needed to bring the sun in later in the afternoon, and the critical location of this intrusion into the site determined the form of the plan for each house, whether shallow or deep, single- or double-aspect. These two sun paths mitigate the narrow 5metre width of the courtyard in relation to the maximum floor area of each house. The re-entrant forms of the courtyard balconies further divide and capture shafts of sunlight as their physical presence etches the courtyard facade and measures the depth of space beyond.

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The living room of House 3. The pervading daylight is divided by the layering of windows and shutters, discriminating between incoming direct light above the datum level and the reected light of the shuttered windows below.

The master bedroom of House 2. The smooth concrete ceiling reects daylight across its surface almost as if it were a cloud movement, whereas the light below becomes shadowy and static.

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An in-situ concrete panel next to a woven copper curtain, both reflecting light from the window.

A wall divided by its closeness to light, in House 2. The upper panel is finished in the finest white clay, which reflects light into the depth of the room; below this is ochre coloured clay, which gives a sombre atmosphere and stillness to the room.

As in Japanese Minka houses, where the rooms are defined by planes of timber, paper and clay, at Walmer Yard there is a limited palette of materials.

In House 3, the vertical board marking of the curved snorkel registers light, in contrast to the carbonised black steel of the screen beyond.

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Planning application drawings from 2005 show the existing buildings set against the proposed conďŹ guration.

The long section through the proposed courtyard and a section through the ramp.

The basement plan. The drawing is shown without cinema rooms on the frontage with Walmer Road, and at the back of the site is the bulkhead of the swimming pool which was later removed.

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Planning application drawings from 2005.

The proposed section through Houses 3 and 4 showing the yurt of House 3 pulled away from the corner, a detail that was later changed.

The ďŹ rst oor plan, in which the circulation is extended to promote privacy between bedrooms. This was later amended.

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Craftsmen Peter Salter0

In William Golding’s book The Spire, there is a description of the working practices and living arrangements of the journeymen carpenters, stonemasons and apprentices. Cathedral building was carried out in distinct building periods, sometimes seasonal and sometimes spanning generations of benefactors and craftsmen. The journeymen travelled to site with their families and camped around it or took lodgings in the immediate vicinity.

In the first phase of preparing the construction drawings for Walmer Yard, the site architect did indeed camp on-site; he was a tough man from the Canadian wilderness. As construction phase succeeded construction phase, Walmer Yard’s equivalent of the master carpenter, the contractor Daren Bye, installed himself with all the accoutrements of office. Benevolent and powerful, the descendant of a maker and painter of Gypsy caravans, he organised the trades whose workers seemed to be either related to him or came as compatriot craftsmen from other places. One such team came from the Dalmatian coast. Like their forebears, who inlaid the precious stones from that coastline into the floor surfaces of Venice, these craftsmen placed individual stones into Walmer Yard’s terrazzo-like screeds, exchanging coloured marbles for black Scottish river pebbles set into a matrix of brown gravels from the Thames Estuary. All were ground and polished. In other places, three-stone floor patterns were laid in homage to their Japanese equivalents, an exercise that required particular spatial awareness to prevent the stones from looking like a dog’s paw prints.

As hard hats gave way to low-slung tool belts, the atmosphere and order of the canteen changed, from discarded copies of the Daily Star and Mirror, overwritten with betting odds, to the aromatic smells of stews made in ‘digs’ and heated up in the microwave, and a new orderly arrangement of tea mugs.

Once the formwork was struck, the poured concrete revealed both its beauty and its faults – aggregate bridging like the acne of a teenager – do you treat it or leave it? Each blotch requires a decision, the skill of the concrete repairman hides the truth: each site of aggregate bridging is judged to be left or

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not. A mask is applied to set out the limits of the remedial work according to the severity of the bridging, most are just scabbled back to become a rectangle of different texture that exposes the larger aggregates of the concrete, almost like the conservation patches of a painting. Mick takes on this job, the delicacy of wielding the scabble gun only matched by the artistry of Japanese body tattoos on his upper arms and shoulders.

Eventually, what were to become the largest elements of the finished architecture – the rooftop ‘yurts’ – arrive not on the back of a Mongolian yak, but on a low-loader from Devon. The low-loaders travelling through the night streets of Paris carrying the gerberettes for the Pompidou Centre are the stuff of legend. The only similarity between our roof structures and those in Paris lay in the slowness of the transport and the fact that the road had to be closed.

The laser-cut components, preassembled and disassembled in a rural barn, were lifted into position and held in suspension by the crane until all the components were bolted together. It took six carpenters to shunt and manhandle each frame into place. Only then did we have structural integrity.

Their gradual assembly diminished and at the same time intensified the view of the sky. Looking up into their curves and stays was like peering up into the leaf canopy of a tree.

Unlike the symmetrical structure of the Mongolian yurt, the resulting rooftop room on each of the three houses is asymmetric in form. They echo what Soetsu Yanagi describes in his book, The Unknown Craftsman, as ‘irregular forms … deformations … avoidance of the regular’, comparable to the dimpled and irregular shape of a Japanese tea ceremony bowl. Their interiors of chopped straw and black clay plaster follow once again a Japanese aesthetic of ‘roughness … beauty of the imperfect’. The use of chopped straw and clay in a range of earth colours, adopted throughout the houses, follows the patchwork quality of traditional interiors of Japanese farmhouses in which light reflection dictates the colour of the plasters. At Walmer Yard, the delicacy of the surfaces works with the grain of poured

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The window at ceiling level spies on the kitchen from the hall. It forms part of an ensemble of windows registering level changes, in which the kitchen is at ground level between the raised ground oor of the hallway and the basement below.

The second bedroom in House 4. The cill height of the window corresponds to the yard level outside; both register the anticipated height of the bed. The yard shelters the bedroom from the city beyond, whilst enabling reflected sunlight to bounce across the room and reflect against the black steel partition deep within the space.

The external wall is finished with boardmarked concrete.

CONTRIBUTORS’ BIOGRAPHIES Peter Salter began his career in the studio of Alison and Peter Smithson. In the early 1980s, he formed a partnership with Christopher Macdonald, producing a series of projects known for their highly developed and evocative drawings.

Throughout the 1980s and ‘90s he taught at the Architectural Association as a unit master. In 1995, he became professor and head of school at the University of East London, and is now Professor of Architectural Design at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. In 2004, he won the RIBA Annie Spink Award for his outstanding contribution to architectural education, and in 2012 was elected a Hon FRIBA. In 2018, he and Fenella Collingridge exhibited ‘Proposal B’ at the Venice Biennale. Walmer Yard received a RIBA National Award in 2017.

Fenella Collingridge was associate designer of Walmer Yard. For many years she taught architecture at the Royal College of Art. She teaches at the Architectural Association and has run research projects into the relationship between colour, volume, tone and texture in architecture. She exhibited ‘Proposal B’ with Peter Salter at the Venice Biennale in 2018.

Crispin Kelly studied history at Oxford, before becoming a developer and qualifying as an architect. He has contributed to journals on topics ranging from art in public space to the qualities of successful suburbs. He is a past president of the Architectural Association, and currently chairs the board of trustees of the London School of Architecture, and Open City.

Matthew Ritchie is a visual artist whose practice includes painting, wall drawings, light boxes, sculpture, performance, virtual reality, music, text and projections. His work has been exhibited worldwide, including the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Architecture Biennale.

He is currently an Artist-in-Residence at MIT and a Mentor Professor at Columbia University.

Peter Beardsell taught at Chelsea College of Art and Design, in Interior and Spatial Design. He also taught at the Architectural Association, with Peter Salter, and at the School of Architecture at the University of East London. He is currently a visiting critic at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University.

Hélène Binet is a Swiss/French photographer, currently living in London. Her work has been published in a wide range of books, and shown in numerous exhibitions. An advocate of analogue photography, she works exclusively with film. In 2019 she was awarded the Ada Louise Huxtable Prize for her exceptional contribution in the field of architecture.

Mark Dorrian holds the Forbes Chair in Architecture at the University of Edinburgh and co-directs Metis, an atelier for art, architecture and urbanism. His recent books include Seeing From Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture (2013) and a volume of collected essays titled Writing On The Image: Architecture, the City and the Politics of Representation (2015).

Dennis Crompton is one of the six members of the architectural collective, Archigram, who were awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2002. For many years he taught at the Architectural Association and was responsible for the production of the AA’s publications and exhibitions from 1976 to 1994 as the coordinator of the Communications Unit.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The publisher would like to thank Crispin Kelly, who first proposed making this book. Profuse thanks are also due to Peter Salter and Fenella Collingridge, for their consistent encouragement and guidance; Laura Mark, for her calm organisational input; Dennis Crompton, for his strong graphic design direction and eternal unflappability; Hélène Binet, for her wonderful photographs; essayists Peter Beardsell, Mark Dorrian and Matthew Ritchie for their critical insights; and finally, Julia Dawson for diligently proofreading the text.

David Jenkins, London, February 2019

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